Your Smartphone Works for the Surveillance State

I was 10 years old when the Berlin Wall came down — old enough to grasp that something important was happening, but not really old enough to understand exactly what was happening. Like a lot of kids born around that age, the specter of communism has never seemed like that much of a threat. We would hear stories about how horrific life was living under conditions such as these; but only in the context of something that had already failed. It’s only through history and books or films that my generation has a grasp of what life must have been like.

Just recently, I had the chance to watch the German film, The Lives of Others, which won the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Not only is it a remarkable story, but it gave me the best glimpse I’ve had yet of what day-to-day life must have been like in a state like East Germany. The infamous East German secret police, the Stasi, managed to infiltrate every pay of German life, from factories, to schools, to apartment blocks — the Stasi had eyes and ears everywhere. When East Germany collapsed in 1989, it was reported to have over 90,000 employees and over 170,000 informants. Including the part-time informants, that made for about one in every 63 East Germans collaborating to collect intelligence on their fellow citizens. You can imagine what that must have meant: people had to live with the fact that every time they said something, there was a very real chance that it was being listened to by someone other than for whom they intended. No secret police force in history has ever spied on its own people on a scale like the Stasi did in East Germany. In large part because of that, those two words — “East Germany” — are indelibly imprinted on the psyche of the West as an example of how important the principles of liberal democracy are in protecting us from such things happening again. And indeed, the idea that it would happen seems anathema to most people in the western world today — almost unthinkable.

And yet, here we are. In terms of the capability to listen to, watch and keep tabs on what its citizens are doing, the East German government could not possibly have dreamed of achieving what the United States government has managed to put in place today.

The execution of these systems is, as you’d expect, very different. The Germans relied upon people, which, even if not entirely effective, must have been absolutely terrifying: if for no other reason than you weren’t sure who you could and could not trust. There was always that chance someone was reporting back on you. It might have been a colleague. A neighbor. A shop keeper. A school teacher. Not knowing whether someone you couldn’t see was listening to what you had to say, or whether those that you could see might be passing it back to the authorities — that must have taken an incredibly heavy toll on people.

But as any internet entrepreneur will tell you, relying entirely on people makes scaling difficult. Technology, on the other hand, makes it much easier. And that means that in many respects, what has emerged today is almost more pernicious; because that same technology has effectively turned not just some, but every single person you communicate with using technology — your acquaintances, your colleagues, your family and your friends — into those equivalent informants.

Think about the proportion of our lives that are undertaken online and digitally. Every tweet, every interaction on Facebook, every photo on Instagram. You search for directions with a myriad of online mapping options. You check in your location on Foursquare. You review restaurants you’ve visited on Yelp. You speak to people all over the world using Skype. Every time you have a question, you type it into Google, or perhaps ask it on Quora. An increasing amount of your purchases are conducted on eBay or Amazon. You back up your laptop to the cloud. Almost everything you listen to or read is there too, or in iTunes. And while you might scoff at these as something that only early adopters use, even late adopters of digital technologies leave behind an incredibly detailed trail of their lives. Every minute you spend on the phone; in fact, every minute you carry it around in your pocket; every email you write; every instant message you send. Every transaction that passes through your credit card is recorded.

For an average person, with access to just one of these, you could piece together quite an interesting picture of a person’s life. Interviewed recently on the Charlie Rose Show, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, observed that for a lot of people, “email is the most intimate witness to our lives in some capacity. [It] knows a lot about our lives.” But that’s absolutely nothing compared to the portrait you could paint of somebody with access to a full range of all these services.

But the technology alone isn’t the problem. There has been a dramatic shift in mentality, and it doesn’t take much to work out the date on which this happened: September 11, 2001.

Much has been said about what happened in the aftermath of that tragic event. The extent to which there was an extreme political response is understandable, if not entirely forgivable. What is more shocking, however, is that ten years on — with the risk of death being higher from a lightning strike than from a terrorist attack, and with the election of a President that had railed against “a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide” — the problem hasn’t got better at all.

In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s got worse. Way worse.

Well before the revelations of the last two days, there had been serious hints that things were going astray. Like the data center off in the desert of Utah, apparently part of a network capable of storing yottabytes of data (I don’t know about you, but I’d never even heard the term “yottabyte” before). A former employee of the NSA described the basic premise of the center as just to capture everything: “financial transactions or travel or anything… [and] the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time.” Similarly, the Verizon revelations shouldn’t come as that big a surprise; according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit, AT&T had provided the NSA “with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center” as far back as 2006.

And you could even see symptoms of the problem overseas. Europe — yes, the former home of East Germany — bravely proposed a series of changes to its laws that would enshrine the privacy of its citizens. These proposals would strike most people as reasonable: a right to get information out of a provider in a form that could be taken to a rival provider, and a right to be forgotten by a provider. Who was opposed to this? Not China or Iran, concerned that its citizens might benefit from rules that would allow them to cover their footprints or that companies would have a much stronger incentive to protect users’ privacy. Instead, it was an all-American alliance: US technology firms, concerned that privacy might undercut their business models, and the US government, worried that their ability to surveil without issue might be disturbed. The scale of the lobbying effort to defeat these privacy regulations was so unprecedented that it caused EU Commissioner Viviane Reding to say that “I have not seen such a heavy lobbying operation.”

The government will undoubtedly argue that the way in which this surveillance is all being conducted is very different to how it would be used in a non-democratic state; that is in fact exactly the line taken in an exit interview by Alec J. Ross, the State Department’s outgoing senior adviser on innovation: “the truth of the matter is that there are laws and due process in the United States that protect our liberties to a degree that simply do not exist in 99% of the rest of the world.” The evidence points to the contrary, however. For example, over the past ten years, the Supreme Court has prevented any challenge to the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, relying on logic that could have been lifted straight out of Catch-22: to “properly challenge secret Government programs requires the very information the Government refuses to disclose” — in other words, nobody actually has the standing to challenge the policy. And even in the presence of evidence — for example, let’s say the Government erroneously had sent you documentation of the fact that you’re being warrantlessly wiretapped — then it will simply fall back on argument of sovereign immunity to have the case dismissed.

There’s not a thing that can be done about it.

Now, if this was an ideological principle — a deep and profound belief in transparency, and the disinfecting power of sunlight — then, again, at least it would be understandable. But it’s not that, either. Simultaneously, while doing everything it can to watch you, the government is taking another page out of the East German playbook — doing everything it can to stop you from watching it.

The Washington Post ran a special back in 2010 entitled “Top Secret America” that detailed the extent to which this was taking place. “The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” There is an entire industry that is simply out of the view of the public. Information about what Government is doing — essential for people to be able to make an informed choice in a representative democracy — is simply buried within it. Over-classifying has been turned into an art form. Embarrassing information is increasingly being classified, so it never sees the light of day. In fact, just last year, US Government transparency has hit an all-time low: the government cited national security “to withhold information at least 5,223 times — a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama’s first year in office. The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.”

The difficulty with which it is possible to pry open this world, and the consequences for doing so, are escalating rapidly, too. Whistleblowers are being strung up: say you leak information about government financial waste and mismanagement, well, you could find yourself being charged under the Espionage Act — the same statute used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B. In fact, this administration has launched more prosecutions of whistleblowers using this law than every previous administration combined. It has sought rules to allow federal agencies to fire employees without appeal if their work has some tie to national security. FBI investigations into leaks just so happen to be conducted in a way to ensure a chilling of the relationship between government officials and journalists. Then theere’s the cases of Bradley Manning and John Kiriakou.

And while whistleblowers are being strung up, journalists are being hunted down, too. The DoJ secretly obtained two months of telephone records of AP journalists. Similarly, Fox News reporter James Rosen went from being a journalist to an “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in order to get a subpoena for his private email account. As the New Yorker pointed out, it was “unprecedented for the government, in an official court document, to accuse a reporter of breaking the law for conducting the routine business of reporting on government secrets.”

And we haven’t even touched on the topic of Wikileaks. Despite it taking on the role of a publisher, using the power of the internet to avoid the requirement of a legacy print business, it wasn’t long after it started peeling back all these layers of secrecy that it was denounced by some as a terrorist organization. One might wonder how the East Germans would have reacted to such an organization? Perhaps Lenin, who had a 19-meter statue erected of him in Leninplatz in Berlin, might offer us some clues to as the way they would have thought about it: “Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?”

It’s a line of reasoning that befits a failed surveillance state. And yet today, is remains all too familiar.

Yesterday, when news of the PRISM program leaked into the public domain, two items struck me. The first, from the New York Times: “The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching… said that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future.” And then, there was this, from the Washington Post: “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”

Watching peoples’ ideas form as they type, in order to protect against someone who might become a terrorist in the future. George Orwell, eat your heart out.

The thing about that wall that cleft Berlin in half is that it didn’t just represent a means of keeping people from freely moving. It represented something much more — it was about ideas and principles. About the balance between security and freedom. About whether you were there to serve the state, or the state was there to serve you. What I can’t seem to shake is the feeling that somehow, the country most responsible for tearing that wall down has somehow managed to rebuild one in its own back yard.